by Raine Miller
I tilted my head to peek around the door, but then pulled back quickly, anticipating a horrifying monster face to punch out and scare the crap out of me.
No freaky Halloween gag-greeting exploded from behind the door.
But there was something.
Actually, it was someone.
And not the host of the party, either.
“Hello, Pink. I’ve been waiting for you.” He smiled, his eyes registering my costume before widening his mouth into an even bigger grin. “That’s a very pretty dress, but I think the sign you’ve pinned to the skirt needs to go, baby. No more running away.”
“Gr-aay?” I stuttered, momentarily shocked to see him. Grayson Lash looked as delicious as usual, this time in bespoke gray pinstripe from head to toe. In keeping with the Halloween theme, a nametag in the shape of a crayon with GRAY written on it, in gray magic-marker of course, stuck to his jacket. “What are you doing here?”
“Lance invited me, but I’m really here just for you, Pink,” he answered in his sexy drawl, “and you already know why.”
“What do you want, Gray?” I regretted my question the instant the words left my mouth, because he was correct—I did know.
He laughed and shook his head slowly as he stared me down. “You’re gonna make me say it again, even though you know exactly what I want.” He gave me another thorough perusal, his lingering look in the vicinity of my cleavage making my body heat spike in places that hadn’t seen any action in nearly two months. The exact same amount of time since I’d seen Gray. “Hell, you’re even dressed for it,” he added on for clarification.
“Why are you really here?”
“Because I want you to marry me,” he said clearly.
Gray’s tall frame filling Lance’s doorway went a little blurry before my eyes as my vision clouded up. Suddenly, there didn’t seem to be enough air left for me to breathe—in all of North America.
I was going down…and it was probably going to hurt.
There are moments in life when time moves so fast you can’t possibly process what’s really happening to you.
This was definitely one of those moments.
“Welcome back.” The words fell from soft lips hovering right above mine, the unmistakable sound of relief in his tone. “I wasn’t sure if you were breathing there for a minute. I was about to start CPR on you. Don’t fuckin’ do that again, Pink. You scared the hell out of me.” Gray’s words were harsh, but delivered gently as his fingers stroked across my temple.
“What happened? What did I—” I tried to sit up from what appeared to be a…bed? “Why am I in Lance’s bed?” I asked, confused and disoriented.
He frowned and increased his hold on me. “How do you know this is Lance’s bed? Have you been in it before?”
“Yes.” My mind was spinning from the unreality of Gray literally on top of me in a bed. I couldn’t stop my brain from processing exactly how the weight of him felt pressed against me. Damn good, unfortunately.
The warm chocolate brown of his eyes turned dark and his frown deepened. “You have? When? I’ma hafta kill him now.”
“Stop it. I’ve been in his bedroom before, not his bed.” I had to admit the possessiveness Gray was displaying didn’t offend me. It should have annoyed me greatly, but I found it endearing. It showed he cared about me on some level, the extent to which he cared was still something I was trying to figure out.
“Why in the hell have you been in Oakley’s bedroom?”
I pushed against him again in an attempt to get him off. It was like trying to move a brick fence. “This is cute, it really is, Gray, but I don’t care for your tone or your implications. Lance is a friend and that’s all he is. You know this very well, so stop being a stupid ass.”
“You still haven’t told me why you’ve been in this bedroom before,” he shot back.
“For the record, I don’t owe you explanations about any of the reasons I go into other people’s bedrooms, but if you must know I brought him dinner a few times when he was laid up after his car accident…as any good friend would do.” Gray’s chocolaty eyes blinked down at me, processing the truth of my explanation.
“Oh yeah, his accident,” he mumbled a little less possessively.
“Enough with this big, dumb ape routine you’ve got going.” I shoved with both hands to his chest while twisting my lower body as hard as I could, in an attempt to get him to budge. “Will you get off me, Grayson Lash!”
His response was to give me another one of his signature lazy grins before moving off to his side. The second his body separated from mine, I felt the loss of his warm weight almost painfully. I’d also felt an erection when I’d bucked my hips to get him off me.
This was not good.
Gray was the one person who held the power to turn my life upside down, and I could see he was still determined to try. The premonition I’d felt so strongly while walking up the steps to Lance’s front door? That feeling I was teetering on the precipice of a shifting change?
The very one.
Well, Gray had just confirmed precisely what “shift” was going to mean for me—and it meant I was in big, big trouble.
My mind started whirling with facts and details of what I already knew. Conversations that we’d had. Comments made here and there by my grandparents, and even my mother over the years. My mother’s strange message about my inheritance coming due made a lot more sense to me now. She misspoke on the phone. It wasn’t an inheritance, but rather it was an inheritance debt that was coming due with my twenty-fifth birthday.
Fuck.
“Why are we up here in Lance’s bed anyway? What happened to me?” I managed to ask as my chest started in with the familiar, but unwelcome tightening.
“You went sideways on me in the doorway, so I had to catch you. Lance said to put you in here.”
“You carried me up all those stairs?” I asked incredulously.
He cracked a smug grin. “I did.” He flexed a bicep into a pose for me. “The extra workouts I’ve been putting in have really paid off.”
“No wonder you had to lie down.”
“Nah, I’m kidding. You’re a feather, Pink. It was more of a chance to feel you up while I checked your vitals. I mean, I think it’s time to really get to know each other on a more intimate level before we sign off on this marriage, don’t you agree?” Gray loved to tease and flirt with me, and he always had, but this version of him felt very different. He was dead serious.
Instinctively, I started patting my hand around the bed to locate my purse. I needed a puff off my inhaler before having this conversation with him.
My asthma episodes had a way of showing up at the worst times.
Kind of like Grayson Thaddeus Lash III.
No. I didn’t want to believe this was real. He could not possibly be here calling in a promise nobody had ever really taken seriously. But you know they do.
Maybe this wasn’t asthma at all. I’d hit my head when I went down in the doorway, and my headache was back to maximum pounding, so yeah, it very well could be the effects of a head-injury combined with being trapped inside of a bizarre dream.
The same dream (nightmare) I was most surely having at this very moment.
The one where Gray was telling me we were getting married.
“No, is the wrong answer, sweetheart, and you are definitely not dreaming.”
Dear God, did I just say that out loud?
“Yes, you did. And yes, is the only answer I want to hear out of your pretty mouth. I’ll accept a yes from you, and then you can give me the date you want for the wedding.”
“What wedding?” It came out sounding more like “wha-weh-ing” but Gray totally understood me.
“Our wedding, darling, and don’t forget that time is working against us with your birthday only two months away.”
Fuck, fuck, fuck!
“Oh, we will, Pink, we most definitely will, don’t you worry,” he said with that sexy Carolina drawl of his that rol
led off his tongue, as smoothly as his promise of some hot and dirty sex.
Would the sex be hot and dirty with Gray?
I already knew the answer to that pointless question, aaaand now I was officially out of oxygen.
“Purse—inhaler,” I gasped, before I was unable to do even that.
Chapter Three
GRAY
“I would really appreciate it if you could be done with this whole no-breathing thing. I don’t like it.” I held her inhaler up to her mouth. “Big breath in for me, baby,” I coached before propping her to a sitting position against the headboard. “Slow and easy now…let the medicine go to work.”
Her green-gold eyes held mine for just a moment, before she rested her head down on her knees in exhaustion. “Graaay—”
“Shush now. Don’t try to talk. You’ve officially scared the ever lovin’ shit out of me, Pink. Breathe…steady and slow. Do you need another hit? Just nod if you do.”
She nodded and lifted her head for the inhaler, proving she was able to comprehend my panicked babbling. My hand visibly shaking as I helped her take another puff was my wake-up call that my feelings for Reese ran so much deeper than I’d ever let myself believe.
Jesus Christ, this was terrifying.
I also felt like the biggest shitheel on the planet for being the cause of the goddamn asthma attack in the first place. I fucked up with her tonight and there was no denying it.
“The paramedics are on their way, baby. You’re doin’ great.”
“No—please—I don’t want to—” she protested.
“Yes, you are going to the ER,” I interrupted, speaking as calmly as I could manage. “You need to be checked out by a doctor.” I left off the part about never sleeping again, if she didn’t get examined by a medical doctor at a fucking hospital tonight. It was a miracle I didn’t need to change my shorts right now. When she started wheezing and sucking in a whole lot of nothing? My heart—just, stopped.
A few tears rolled down her splotchy cheeks, flushed red from the rush of oxygen she was finally taking in as the rescue inhaler did its job. Thank holy fuck. “I’ll be with you every second,” I said while rubbing circles over her back with my palm.
She leaned her forehead against my chest and I felt her relax as her breathing steadied, the panic in both of us easing away. The best damn feeling in the world.
I would hold her like this forever if I had to. I couldn’t stop touching her now that I’d started. She was mine to take care of. She’d always been mine. This was the woman I was going to marry and make babies with—even if she didn’t believe it quite yet.
She would.
I’d been waiting for months to make my move. I’d almost lost her once before to that idiot archaeology professor, and I wouldn’t be letting that shit happen again. After he left her, I’d given her some time to get over him. Even if I’d wanted to go slower with Reese, time was a luxury I just didn’t have anymore. Neither of us did. The sand in our hourglass was just about gone for fulfilling the terms of her grandfather’s will. Only the two of us could make those very beneficial terms a reality by first, getting married before she turned twenty-five, and then second, by having a son whose surname would legally change to Pinkarver-Lash in order to carry on the Pinkarver name in the bloodlines.
And two months was all the time I had left to get her to the altar, and my ring on her finger.
I met Reese Pinkarver when she was ten years old, at a party held in the rose garden at Mount Laurel. My family’s historic plantation just outside of Charleston was the perfect setting for our introduction, because the significance of the place helped drive home the importance of precisely what was expected of me. Mount Laurel is the birthplace of Grayson Thaddeus Lash I, former President of the United States of America, and my esteemed grandfather.
I was an eighteen-year-old college freshman—so technically an adult while definitely still very much a kid in the head—when my father, Grayson Thaddeus Lash II, pointed her out to me in the rose garden, and told me the wide-eyed little girl with the blond curls holding onto her mother’s hand in a death-grip, was the person I would marry.
It wasn’t even a suggestion by any means, but a requirement. She had been chosen specifically for me, he said. It only made sense that the direct descendants of presidential bloodlines running as blue as ours, were strengthened by making more little Pinkarver-Lash’s to add to the ever-expanding family tree.
To be fair, I believe my father was feeling the nostalgic urge to ensure our family’s history was carried on because my grandfather had passed just the year before. Something I didn’t appreciate until I was faced with the same scenario many years later.
At the time, I let my father’s—You’ll marry that girl someday, Gray—nonsense go through one of my eighteen-year-old ears and right on out the other. I did not care what he or anyone else required of me. I was young, dumb, and full-of-cum, just like every other male in their first year of college. I was all up my own ass perfecting my skills with women who were my own goddamn age for one thing. Being matched up with a child was downright disturbing. Having my life laid out for me without my input or consent was fucking infuriating. Marrying any person was a foreign concept I couldn’t even entertain. Having children?
I was not hearing any part of what he had to say.
Dad could go after one of my sisters in forging his political dynasty with some other sap-bastard, Son-of-America. My own parents had shown me just how painful marriage could be during the course of my whole life. There was no shining example of a loving relationship for me to draw an experience from, so his words meant very little to me.
As the years passed, Reese and I met at more garden parties, charity balls, and even an event or two at the White House. We forged a friendship over time, as I made more of an effort to get to know her while she grew up before my eyes. I found her delightful, and she seemed to look up to me almost like the big brother she never had. The two of us were connected family acquaintances with an easy friendship, and nothing more than that. There were no awkward moments, nothing weird between us whenever we did happen to run into each other somewhere in Charleston or the DC area. The edict my father had given me so long ago in the rose garden at Mount Laurel was pretty much forgotten in the past where it stayed buried.
Until two years ago when Reese and her family showed up to my father’s funeral.
No longer a shy little girl clinging to her mother for security, but a confident beauty who’d grown into a lovely young woman. My whole opinion of her, and how she might fit into my life, changed dramatically with the event of my father’s death.
I found a great deal had changed for Reese, and for me, in the thirteen years since the garden party down at Mount Laurel when my dad told me she would be my wife and the mother of my children someday.
That’s about the time “it got weird” between us—and I can honestly say the blame was one hundred percent on me. It wasn’t Reese’s fault I’d been raised with certain expectations from birth. A law degree from Harvard was one of those expectations. A career in the family business of politics was another. I’d accomplished the Harvard Law degree and was working my way up the political food chain with my new term as Attorney General for South Carolina solidly in place. It was also assumed that my crowning political achievement would be the governor’s mansion someday, and it very well could be if all the pieces fell into place as they were supposed to.
The most important piece of that puzzle was in the back of an ambulance being administered a breathing-treatment for an asthma attack, brought on by me being the demanding asshole I was pretty much most of the time.
I’d have to work on that with her, because Reese certainly didn’t deserve an asshole for a husband.
And I would be her husband. That wedding shit I’d said no to before? It was happening.
My lovely Pink deserved the best husband in the world. She deserved the best of everything life had to offer. Hell, she deserved to be First
Lady of South Carolina, and maybe even more, someday.
And she was getting me in the process, even if she wasn’t sure she wanted me yet.
She might not be sure, but I was certain she felt the attraction between us. It was definitely there that night two months ago when I came to see her…and we ended up in my suite at The Jefferson for the night.
Reese felt something for me, or she wouldn’t have reacted so strongly when I showed up tonight. She wouldn’t be gripping my hand so tightly right now, or let me hold her while waiting for the ambulance to show up at Oakley’s house.
“How are we doing, baby?” I leaned down to ask against her ear so she could hear me.
Her eyes flickered open, and she nodded up at me before mouthing three words I understood as clearly as if she’d been able to shout them. “Stay with me.”
“I’ll be right here the whole time. I won’t leave you,” I assured her with a confident wink solely for her benefit, even though I didn’t feel so confident on the inside.
My emotions were all over the place, and for good reason. I’d waited far too long to make my move with Reese. By the time I was ready to settle down, she’d already found her professor with the PhD in Pre-Colonial Amazonia or some ridiculous shit, and to my horror, agreed to marry him.
I’d blown my chance with Reese, and then it was too late. Someone else had won her heart by being there with her. While I was down in South Carolina finding my footing as head of the family after my father’s death, someone else was stealing my woman away.
I learned an important lesson about priorities. I also learned never to assume the outcome of a relationship with another person. My feelings for Reese became crystal clear the moment I realized someone else was taking her to bed every night. She didn’t belong in any other bed but mine. It sucked to realize I’d lost her, but I did accept that I was fully to blame.